How to survive dungeon stacking?
just stay in max melee range, 300 units from boss. your group will body block most attacks for you unless you get boss aggro (which happens a lot cause staff ele is one of the highest dps in game)
also arcane shield helps
A man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting.
-Carlos Castaneda
Skady Valda
-Carlos Castaneda
Skady Valda
Arcane Shield, Armor of Earth ( I swap LF for AoE for stacking ). Also try to Deep Freeze bosses with Frost Bow #5 once they get to you. It gives you basically 5 “free seconds”. Enough time to cast #4, drop the Bow, then Meteor Shower.
#ELEtism
No, don’t use armor of earth in dungeons… that’s ridiculous advice.
First of all you shouldn’t only be using staff. Sometimes the party will lack might+fury in which case it’d be wise to use either S/F or D/F (never S/D, that’s an atrocious weaponset). I suggest D/F, as scepter is actually terrible unless you’re literally only using it to stack might. Someone using scepter should anticipate to be using LH to attack with. With focus offhand you have a lot of defensive utility: swirling winds, magnetic wave, obsidian flesh. Use when appropriate.
If you are staff, you should be using either 66200, 66002, 64220, 64202 — one of those trait point combinations. If you choose to go 6 in air, then take tempest defense for your grandmaster for 20% damage increase against stunned foes (deep freeze works wonders with it).
Your utilities should typically be arcane wave, signet of fire, conjure ice bow, glyph of storms — alternate between these mostly. As a staff elementalist, you’re going to have an easier time the faster things die. You have the absolute best AoE potential like this.
Glyph of storms used in earth attunement pulses 11 times in 10 seconds for essentially perma-blinding up to 5 targets. This is extremely helpful defense against trash mobs. Alternatively, glyph of storms in air attunement has 36 lightning bolt impacts that each inflict 2 stacks of vulnerability. This is very helpful to take down bosses as it quickly puts them at 25 stacks of vulnerability (25% more incoming damage).
As a staff elementalist, you’ll typically want to begin an encounter on earth.
Generally speaking, a nice way to begin a fight is…
Earth #2 > swap to air > use glyph of storms (lightning storm) > quickly swap to fire > put down a lava font and the eruption from earth should blast in the lava font dealing damage and stacking might/fury. Immediately after the lava font, use the third skill in fire attunement to inflict burning as it’ll proc your 10% damage modifier in the fire trait line. Quickly afterwards, spawn an ice bow and do ice storm (#4) followed by #3 if you’re in close range (#3 on ice bow is decent burst + provides a negligible amount of chill). It’s good to use in close range as it’s nearly instant cast.
Afterwards, cast another lava font followed by a meteor shower and continue autoattacking + casting lava fonts off cooldown.
Aside from that, make use of your dodgerolls whenever you have endurance for it. Dodging is 0.75s of invulnerability and just about all bosses in this game have predictable and rather slow attacks.
Especially when doing an encounter that you aren’t used to, it may be hard to actually know what cues to look for until it’s too late. I’ve found that it’s easier to focus on dodges if you hide your UI. Without the distractions of cooldowns (that you can basically feel out if you’re used to them), health bars, damage numbers, messages, etc. the only thing you need to pay attention to is what the boss is physically doing. I’ve found that doing this has helped me notice what to actually look for in a boss’ animations and then every encounter after that, I can react better.
No, don’t use armor of earth in dungeons… that’s ridiculous advice.
First of all you shouldn’t only be using staff. Sometimes the party will lack might+fury in which case it’d be wise to use either S/F or D/F (never S/D, that’s an atrocious weaponset). I suggest D/F, as scepter is actually terrible unless you’re literally only using it to stack might. Someone using scepter should anticipate to be using LH to attack with. With focus offhand you have a lot of defensive utility: swirling winds, magnetic wave, obsidian flesh. Use when appropriate.
If you are staff, you should be using either 66200, 66002, 64220, 64202 — one of those trait point combinations. If you choose to go 6 in air, then take tempest defense for your grandmaster for 20% damage increase against stunned foes (deep freeze works wonders with it).
Your utilities should typically be arcane wave, signet of fire, conjure ice bow, glyph of storms — alternate between these mostly. As a staff elementalist, you’re going to have an easier time the faster things die. You have the absolute best AoE potential like this.
Glyph of storms used in earth attunement pulses 11 times in 10 seconds for essentially perma-blinding up to 5 targets. This is extremely helpful defense against trash mobs. Alternatively, glyph of storms in air attunement has 36 lightning bolt impacts that each inflict 2 stacks of vulnerability. This is very helpful to take down bosses as it quickly puts them at 25 stacks of vulnerability (25% more incoming damage).
As a staff elementalist, you’ll typically want to begin an encounter on earth.
Generally speaking, a nice way to begin a fight is…
Earth #2 > swap to air > use glyph of storms (lightning storm) > quickly swap to fire > put down a lava font and the eruption from earth should blast in the lava font dealing damage and stacking might/fury. Immediately after the lava font, use the third skill in fire attunement to inflict burning as it’ll proc your 10% damage modifier in the fire trait line. Quickly afterwards, spawn an ice bow and do ice storm (#4) followed by #3 if you’re in close range (#3 on ice bow is decent burst + provides a negligible amount of chill). It’s good to use in close range as it’s nearly instant cast.
Afterwards, cast another lava font followed by a meteor shower and continue autoattacking + casting lava fonts off cooldown.
Aside from that, make use of your dodgerolls whenever you have endurance for it. Dodging is 0.75s of invulnerability and just about all bosses in this game have predictable and rather slow attacks.
Staff is higher damage and with the 100% uptime fire fields, as long as your party has others that can roll blast finishers you’re much better off not using scepter (too condition focused)
I’d also opt for arcane shield over signet of fire. Lower crit chance but arcane shield can mean the difference between getting a meteor shower off or having to dodge and put it on cooldown.
Zapp – 80 Asura Afromancer
snip
Staff is higher damage and with the 100% uptime fire fields, as long as your party has others that can roll blast finishers you’re much better off not using scepter (too condition focused)
I’d also opt for arcane shield over signet of fire. Lower crit chance but arcane shield can mean the difference between getting a meteor shower off or having to dodge and put it on cooldown.
Staff is great yes…if you have a second Ele running LH build
Scepter is just for might, anyone that uses it to auto attack should delete their Ele.
Imo, run D/F if you don’t know your Guardian, S/F LH if you have a Guard that knows what active defense is an Staff if you have another Ele running LH.
Arcane Shield is a crutch with a massive CD, I’d suggest going 66002 instead of 66200 if you really need more survivability .
Hello darkness, my old friend.
As Staff:
Make sure your DPS is as high as it can be, like Miku said; Eruption, Glyph of Storms (air) and Lava Font for an opener, gives yourself and the party 3 Might and some Fury, make sure you use Arcane Wave for another 3 Might and to proc Air VII if you have it. I’d cast that right before the boss reaches the stack, then Frost Bow → Deep Freeze → Ice Storm, even in pugs, half of the dungeon bosses don’t live far past a Deep Freeze, even if it does you still have a full Endurance bar waiting for you, with more Lava Fonts and Meteor Shower for big damage.
Morale of the story:
Deep Freeze the boss.
No point running cantrips to buy yourself 3 extra seconds to make a fight last 6 seconds longer…
snip
Staff is higher damage and with the 100% uptime fire fields, as long as your party has others that can roll blast finishers you’re much better off not using scepter (too condition focused)
I’d also opt for arcane shield over signet of fire. Lower crit chance but arcane shield can mean the difference between getting a meteor shower off or having to dodge and put it on cooldown.
Staff is great yes…if you have a second Ele running LH build
Scepter is just for might, anyone that uses it to auto attack should delete their Ele.
Imo, run D/F if you don’t know your Guardian, S/F LH if you have a Guard that knows what active defense is an Staff if you have another Ele running LH.Arcane Shield is a crutch with a massive CD, I’d suggest going 66002 instead of 66200 if you really need more survivability .
Arcane shield is so that you can just keep using meteor shower till it fully channels rather than having to dodge and put it on 30s cooldown immediately after you started the channel so you’re not getting the full effect. Meteor shower is a 24-30s cd so basically every other MS youi will be able to guarantee the full channel.
Zapp – 80 Asura Afromancer